Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (18 page)

I tasted twelve courses that Bittor had
cooked, and all of them, up to and including the butter and the desserts, had in some
way been touched, more or less, by wood smoke. This probably sounds like a recipe for
monotony. That it was nothing of the kind remains something of a mystery to me. That
oyster? It tasted more like an oyster
than any oyster I have ever
tasted. Somehow, the taste of smoke didn’t merge with the oyster but coexisted
alongside it, held in a perfect balance, so that it underscored the oyster’s meaty
brine, in the way that a frame or window can deepen our appreciation of a view we might
otherwise overlook. Many of the dishes seemed to work that way, the native flavor of an
octopus or tuna belly intensified by just the right note of the right kind of smoke,
much as a careful deployment of salt can bring out the flavors of a food without
announcing its own salty presence.

By the end of the meal, I began to think
that Bittor had figured out how to use smoke as a sixth flavor principle, entitled at
last to equal billing with salt, sour, sweet, bitter, and umami. And maybe smoke
is
that, one of the irreducible, primary colors of taste. Or so at least it
can seem, perhaps because wood smoke was cooked food’s first flavor, the taste we
gave to raw nature when we first introduced it to fire. This, anyway, was the sort of
speculation inspired by Bittor’s cooking, at once so elemental and so delicate
that it becomes a meditation on the nature of cooking itself.

When Bittor and I sat down to talk at a
picnic table outside, he spoke of cooking with wood as the “best way to honor the
product.” For him fire is not about the transformation of nature—of the animals
and plants and fungi he works with—but about achieving something more like an
italicization of nature, making the food more like itself rather than something
else.

“What the grill is going to do is
reveal the excellence or mediocrity of the product,” Bittor explained, which is
why he must go to such lengths to secure the freshest and best produce. For him the
grill is a tool for exploring the natural world, the creatures of the sea and the
meadows (the steak he grilled for me was too good to be true: a cut from a
fourteen-year-old dairy cow that he quickly charred on
both sides at
once in a blazing-hot fire of grapevines) but also of the woods: the various trees he
cooks with. For the trees are clearly this former forester’s first love, and their
flavors inflect everything he touches. Though to my surprise, Bittor insisted that his
medium is not smoke, a taste and a smell he regards as crude; rather, he flavors his
food with the “perfume” or “fragrance” of wood. But isn’t
that communicated to the food by means of smoke? “No, no, no smoke,” he
insisted. It was here I got lost, either in the vagaries of translation or in the
metaphysics of burning trees.

In Bittor’s view, there is no food
that cannot be enhanced by fire, by this quality of that-which-is-not-smoke, though
exactly how to achieve this enhancement is not always obvious. “My cooking is a
work in progress; I am still experimenting.” At the moment, he’s on a quest
to figure out how to grill honey. A metalworker, Bittor has fabricated pans with
stainless-steel meshes so fine he can “cook” something as delicate and
minuscule as caviar. Lennox said it had pained him to watch Bittor experiment with kilo
after kilo of caviar (at $3,200 per kilo) until he was ready to add it to the menu. To
cook mussels, he built a kind of Bundt pan that conducts smoke through a central funnel
to flavor the briny liquor without letting so much as a drop of it escape. For his
butters and ice cream, Bittor briefly warms cream in unglazed crockery that admits only
the most indirect hint of smoke—or, rather, the perfume of wood.

In fact, my meal at Etxebarri began and
ended with variations on smoked cream, and for me these remain the most memorable tastes
of the afternoon, if not of my whole exploration of fire to date. Bittor churns his
butter himself and serves it without bread. It is meant to be eaten plain, like a fine
cheese, and his butters—there were both cow’s milk and goat—become a study in
contrasts, of these two different methods nature has evolved for transforming grass into
butterfat. But that hint of smoke, or whatever you want to call
it, brought out something else in the cream, something entirely unexpected, even
poignant.

Cream—the richest, sweetest part of milk—is
of course
our
first flavor, the taste, in a spoon, of life’s first
freshness and innocence, long before we ever encounter the taste of cooked food. And
what is smoke—or ashes, with which one of the butters has been dusted—if not the very
opposite of that freshness? There it is, innocence and experience mingled in a spoonful
of ice cream. Bittor, whom no one would describe as a sunny man, has figured out a way
to pass a fleeting, chill shadow of mortality over the formerly uncomplicated happiness
of ice cream.

A dark dessert, you might say, and rightly
so, yet the fact that anyone could do so much with so little—with some superlative
produce and a wood fire—strikes me as a most happy and hopeful discovery. In
Bittor’s kitchen I got to witness, and to taste, the apotheosis of the control of
fire. The cook fire, which had seemed so ancient in North Carolina, here in Spain seemed
new again, fresh with possibility.

This is certainly not what you expect to
find in contemporary Spain, a country that has become known for “molecular
gastronomy”—for an elaborate kind of cooking that leans more heavily on science
and technology than on nature, or, as the chefs now call it, “product.” As
it happens, Ferran Adrià, perhaps the world’s most famous exponent of molecular
gastronomy, a chef known for cooking with liquid nitrogen, xanthan gum, synthetic
flavors and textures, and all the other tools of modern food science, is an admirer of
Bittor’s cooking and comes often to Axpe to dine at Etxebarri. Adrià was once
quoted in
Gourmet
magazine saying, “Bittor probably couldn’t be
doing what he’s doing if I hadn’t done what I did first.” It is a
claim of breathtaking arrogance, and when I read it back to Bittor, he bristled
slightly, then waved it away like a fly.

“Ferran cooks for the future,” he
tells me. “I am more interested in going backward. But the further back we can go,
the more we can then advance.

“At this point there are people trying
to cook with no product at all”—with nothing whatever derived from nature. This he
believes is a dead end. “You can fool the palate,” he says, “but you
cannot fool the stomach.”

And yet Ferran Adrià may be right to put his
cooking before Bittor Arguinzoniz’s in this one sense: It may be that a taste for
Bittor’s cooking, for his obsessive, slightly mad investigation into the nature of
wood and fire and food, has been prepared by our culture’s ongoing attempt to
transcend all those things, not just with molecular gastronomy, but with artificial
flavors and colors, synthetic food experiences of every kind, even the microwave oven.
High and low, this is an age of the jaded palate, ever hungry for the next new taste,
the next new sensation, for mediated experiences of every kind. It’s unclear how
far that quest can take us, or when it might lose its savor. But isn’t it always
precisely when we are most at risk of floating away on the sea of our own inventions and
conceits that we seem to row our way back to the firm shore that is nature? And though
the shore we return to is never quite the same one we left, it has not let us down
yet.

“This kind of cooking is as old as man
himself,” Bittor Arguinzoniz says when I ask him why in a world such as ours the
power of cooking over a wood fire should still transfix us. It isn’t very
complicated. “We carry it in our genes. When you come into a room—it could be a
clearing—and you notice the smell of wood smoke, it is a powerful thing. You ask, What
is cooking? And then your senses open!”

Is there anyone alive who actually enjoys
chopping onions? Oh, there may be some Buddhists who give themselves over to the work,
even to the tears, on the principle that, “when chopping onions, just chop
onions”—i.e., don’t resist or complain about it, just be there in the
moment, doing it. But most of us are not so Zen. When chopping onions, we bitch about
chopping onions. It’s no wonder everyday home cooking is in trouble, now that
there are so many cheap and easy ways to outsource the work, chopping included. Prepare
dinner yourself from scratch and, more often than not, the recipe will begin with a dice
of onions, and the onions, more often than not, will resist.

In fact, there are few things we eat that
defend themselves against us quite as effectively as an onion. From the onion’s
point of view, the blade of your knife might as well be the incisor of a rodent: a
mortal threat that elicits a chemical reaction cleverly designed to thwart the would-be
attacker. Hoping to make chopping onions more interesting, if not more pleasant, I
looked into the onion’s strategy, and was
surprised to learn
that the plant does not mount its defense until the moment tooth or blade pierces cell
wall.

If you could shrink yourself down to the
size of a mitochondria or nucleus and swim around inside an undamaged onion cell, you
would find the environment surprisingly benign, the taste of the ambient fluid sweet,
certainly no cause for tears. Although there are four different defense molecules
floating all around you, you probably would not notice them. What you might notice
floating around you are these vacuoles, little balloonlike storage structures that in
onions contain an enzyme that functions as a kind of trigger. When a blade or tooth
breaks open a vacuole, the enzyme escapes, locates one of the defensive molecules, and
breaks it in two. The volatile new chemical compounds that result are what give raw
onions their powerfully sulfurous and irritating smell. One of the most volatile of
these compounds is, aptly, called “the lachrymator”–tear maker. It escapes
from the damaged cell into the air and proceeds to attack the nerve endings in a
mammal’s eyes and nasal passages, before breaking down into a noxious cocktail of
sulfur dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, and sulfuric acid. “A very effective molecular
bomb!” is how Harold McGee describes it. Indeed. Imagine a “food
plant” that greets its eater with a hit of sulfuric acid and tear gas. That is the
onion.

Lately I’ve gotten plenty of practice
chopping onions, because I’ve been spending time in the kitchen learning how to
cook pot dishes—soups, stews, braises—and it seems like almost all of these dishes, no
matter what the culinary tradition, begin with a chopped onion or two or six. This is
one of the many differences between cooking with fire and cooking with water, or for
that matter with any liquid: Pot dishes make much more use of plants—vegetables, herbs,
spices—and usually depend for their flavor on the reactions that occur when plants are
combined with one another, and with meat, in a hot liquid medium. More often than not,
onions constitute the foundation of
these dishes, usually in
combination with a small handful of other aromatic but equally unprepossessing
vegetables, including carrots, celery, peppers, or garlic. Homely in the best sense, pot
dishes are about marrying lots of prosaic little things rather than elevating one big
thing.

In fact, it is the precise combination of
these chopped-up plants that usually gives a pot dish its characteristic flavor and
cultural identity. So if you start with a dice of onions, carrots, and celery sautéed in
butter (or sometimes olive oil), you’ve made a mirepoix, which marks the dish as
French. But if you begin by sautéing a mince of diced onions, carrots, and celery in
olive oil (and perhaps add some garlic, fennel, or parsley), you’ve made a
soffritto, the signature of an Italian dish. However, a “sofrito”—when
spelled with one “f” and one “t”—is a dice of onions, garlic,
and tomato in place of celery, and identifies the dish as Spanish. (Cajun cooking begins
with a dice of onions, garlic, and bell pepper—“the holy trinity.”) If a
recipe calls for a base of diced spring onions, garlic, and ginger, you’ve left
the West entirely and made what is sometimes called an “Asian mirepoix,” the
foundation of many dishes in the Far East. In India, pot dishes usually begin with a
“tarka,” a dice of onions and spices sautéed in clarified butter, or ghee.
Even if we’re unfamiliar with these terms or techniques, the aroma of these
chopped-up plant bases instantly tells us where in the world we are, culinarily
speaking.